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Tech Curiosities: Boounce, ReadyBoost, and Fonolo

Admin.Jane

Three items have piqued my technical curiosity in the past week. One I am excited about sharing because I had good results with it, one that I plan to try, and one I think is likely not ready for consumer prime time . . .

I heard about this on the local public radio community spotlight of a local techical start-up. Billed by its producer as a low-footprint browser add-on that hyper-charges internet searching, Boounce (pronounced "bounce") returns searches from multitudes of standard and vertical search engines as well as niche websites concurrently. With search results organized by clickable icons (when in "Toolbar" mode), Bounce claims to dive deeper and vastly outperform standard search engines in the amount and quality of results -- Because any given single search engine can only return results on their individual ~1% index of the internet. I have not yet experimented with this product, but it's free and interesting. I will be trying it soon.

A friend of mine showed me this last weekend. A feature available in all versions of Windows 7, ReadyBoost enables flash memory to act as additional system RAM. How many of us have system boards that won't recognize as much RAM as our OS will? I tried ReadyBoost early this past week, and giving my netbootk an additional 2gb of RAM seems to have doubled its speed in less than 5 minutes. Extremely cool!

This idea of this two-faced project amused me at first glance, but something about the write-up seemed press-release-y. I looked for more information and found that this software seems to primarily be aimed at call centers and/or customer service organizations to enable their customers in deep-dialing the ever-present over-complicated telephone network by visually representing the call routing map and allowing callers to click on exactly what is needed. The idea is to reduce hold time and improve customer satisfaction. While the Fonolo website makes clear that this software is primarily aimed at customer service organizations, Fonolo has also released free ITunes and IPhone apps for which the single review (ITunes) is poor. While the original PCWorld review I read really interested me, after further research, I just don't think this software is ready for consumer prime time.

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